Page 77 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION

In the US, the major news story of the Clinton administration’s
second term was a sex scandal; the President’s affair with a White
House staff member, Monica Lewinsky.
For Fiske, such journalism is to be welcomed in so far as it
produces a ‘disbelieving’ citizen, exposing suppressed official
information and discrediting establishment shibboleths. ‘The
tabloid press [and increasingly, as noted above, tabloid television]
constantly attempts to incorporate popular tones of voice and
popular stances towards official knowledge . . . this informed
popular scepticism can be, if all too rarely, turned towards events in
the public, political sphere’ (1992, p. 61).
Fiske goes further, asserting that popular journalism is more
honest, less reactionary and more relevant to the world in which
most citizens live than the ‘quality’ journalism regarded as superior
by the majority of liberal commentators. For Fiske, the collision
between commercial necessity and popular rhetoric creates a space
where significant political criticism and dissent can surface. The
existence of this space is independent of the ‘official’ political
complexion of a media organisation. A good example of this
phenomenon was the monarchy debate referred to in Chapter 1.
Presented by Trevor McDonald, one of ITN’s most conservative and
reverential broadcasters, and broadcast at peak-time on the main
commercial channel, the programme was at times fiercely anti-
royal, as the following angry statement by one member of the
participating audience shows:

The Queen is . . . the richest woman in the world. She is the
head of a rotten, class-ridden, corrupt political and social
establishment which is directly responsible for this nation’s
terrible decline.

Carlton TV, which produced the debate, was no hotbed of political
subversion, but in giving space to popular feelings about the
monarchy (and there were pro-monarchy statements too), in what
was undoubtedly a commercially-driven search for high audience
ratings, a kind of subversion was the result.
For other observers, however, the fact that the popular media,
and newspapers in particular, do have political allegiances, is more
important to an understanding of their democratic function than
any acknowledgement, no matter how generous, of their anti-
establishment content. We have already seen that in a capitalist
society such as Britain, the press are permitted to have opinions and

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